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Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Musee de l'Ancien Eveche | Coin Hoard

I find that I am
peculiarly drawn to hoards. It’s not just that my childhood imaginings of
‘buried treasure’ endured and survived a career as a professional
archaeologist. There’s something fascinating in the way we feel we can see into
those moments of deposition, clearly imagining the sequence of events from
hurried deposition in advance of an immediate threat, followed by wondering why
it was never recovered? Was the one who hid their valuables killed? Were they
driven off and never made it back? Did they survive, only to realise that
they’d hid their stuff a little too well and couldn’t find it?

All of these feelings
and questions go through my mind every time I see this pottery vessel stuffed
with treasure. The small-value bronze coins are all of the Late Roman Empire
and date from 268 to 273. In particular, the hoard is dominated by examples
from the reign of Tetricus I (271-274). The collection was discovered in 1979
in Fontanil-Cornillon, Isère. Today, this is an area on the north-western edge
of Grenoble, but in the third century it would have probably been open
countryside.

The museum’s
information card notes that the vessel was buried some 2.5m underground – quite
a substantial bit of digging to hide the family piggybank! Given the dating of
the coins, the museum speculates that the hoard was deposited by its owner at
the time of the first barbarian invasions, but neither they nor I can definitely
state why they were not recovered for nearly 1700 years.